Leaders use stories to inspire

Dave Murphy

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, August 28, 2004

When he was program director of knowledge management at the World Bank in the mid-1990s, Stephen Denning had a hard time persuading people how important it was for the organization to collect its widely scattered information and make it easier to access.

Finally, in 1996, he began telling a story about how a health worker in one of the poorest countries in the world, Zambia, was able to get crucial information about malaria, even though he was in a tiny town nearly 400 miles from the capital. The answer is obvious now, but wasn't eight years ago: The worker went to the Centers for Disease Control's Web site.

What stood out about that anecdote, Denning told his audience, was that the World Bank wasn't in it. The bank had all sorts of crucial information about poverty issues, but it hadn't set up a way to provide that information to the people who needed it most.

That experience helped to convince Denning how important workplace storytelling can be, especially for leaders. That was hard for him to appreciate at first, because it went against his previous beliefs about business communication.

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"It was being crisp and clear and sharp and analytic," Denning said. "Anything anecdotal was bad."

Now he is such a convert that he has written "Squirrel Inc.: A Fable of Leadership Through Storytelling" (Jossey-Bass, $22.95) and is busy spreading the word. In the May issue of the Harvard Business Review, Denning explained how much storytelling should vary, depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

He elaborated on the point in a Chronicle interview, saying that the World Bank story was hardly a gripping one -- and that's what made it effective. If he had offered more details about the health worker and the conditions in Zambia, listeners would have been preoccupied with that situation rather than using their imaginations to see how the bank could fit in.

"My story is really just the scaffolding to get the listeners to build their own story," Denning said.

Other stories vary in detail, depending on their purpose. Denning said they can be used for such things as describing the company's values, communicating who you are and squelching the grapevine.

Leaders who want people to get to know them might offer longer, more vivid anecdotes so that workers can appreciate their perspective, Denning said.

"Through reliving this experience, they can understand what makes you tick."

Denning said that some stories can limit potential damage from the grapevine -- but only if the original grapevine item is spurious or dwells on something relatively trivial. Ideally, such a story should have some gentle humor.

One example he gave was during the 1992 presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton admitted that she hadn't baked cookies. That item was true, but Bill Clinton's campaign felt it was drawing far more attention that it merited. So Clinton's group came back with a response that stopped the issue from being raised anymore.

This was the response, Denning recalled: "George Bush isn't campaigning to be president. He is campaigning to be first lady."